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I spent the first four years after high school at Vanderbilt in Nashville, TN, where I played my saxophone in the marching band and basket ball pep band. Although I was in the right town for a music career, I chose to work in a field where I actually had talent, molecular biology. After getting my B.S., I spent a year working in a medical research lab at Vandy, before earning a spot at the University of Florida's College of Medicine graduate research program.
For the last five years, I've been in Gainesville, the Swamp, working towards developing adeno-associated virus as a gene therapy vector for treating arthritis, or at least that's the title of my dissertation. If my experiments go well this summer, I'll be defending in the early fall, and I'll then I'll finally be done with school. I've written a book chapter on tendons, ligaments, and cartilage for the textbook "Regenerative Medicine" which should be published soon. I don't get any money from it, so don't bother buying it, unless you want to read 35 boring chapters about stem cells before reaching my awesome chapter on the state of the art in orthopaedics. There's also a few scientific papers out there that I've contributed to or written; you can find them if you know where to look.
The rest of my time is spent traveling to NW Arkansas to visit Kim every time I can afford a plane ticket. When I can't do that, I go to the beach with my friends, or anywhere we can get cold beer and enjoy the view. Gainesville is good for that. I'd like to stay in Florida, but I'm not really sure where the next job will be.
